Property requirements of vibration measurements in wind turbine drivetrain bearing condition monitoring

Abstract

Wind turbine drivetrain bearing failures continue to lead to high costs resulting from turbine downtime and maintenance. As the standardised tool to best avoid downtime is online vibration condition monitoring, a lot of research into improving the signal analysis tools of the vibration measurements is currently being performed. However, failures in the main bearing and planetary gears are still going undetected in large numbers. The available field data is limited when it comes to the properties of the stored measurements. Generally, the measurement time and the covered frequency range of the stored measurements are limited compared to the data used in real-time monitoring. Therefore, it is not possible to either reproduce the monitoring or to evaluate new tools developed through research for signal analysis and diagnosis using the readily available field data. This study utilises 12 bearing failures from wind turbine condition monitoring systems to evaluate and make recommendations concerning the optimal properties in terms of measurement time and frequency range the stored measurements should have. The results show that the regularly stored vibration measurements that are available today are, throughout most of the drivetrain, not optimal for research-driven postfailure investigations. Therefore, the storage of longer measurements covering a wider frequency range needs to begin, while researchers need to demand this kind of data.